To increase transmission efficiency and fully enable utilize high gain beam-forming or other multi-antenna techniques in the fifth generation (5G) cellular networks, a concept of access information table (AIT) was introduced. In this concept, user equipments (UEs) are provided with access information by using AIT and a system signature sequence (SSS) in a broadcast transmission, where each SSS may be used to indicate information from the broadcasted AIT. The AIT may for example define settings relating to how a UE shall access the networks, e.g., by a random access procedure, handover procedure or reselection procedure, concerning how the UE can be reached by the system in a paging procedure, or concerning more advanced settings, such as related to beam-forming, link adaptation or Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ).
To reduce network energy consumption, the AITs are typically transmitted with long periodicity, e.g. from 1.024 s up to 10.24 s, while the SSSs are typically transmitted more frequently, e.g. every 100 ms. Typically each access node, e.g., a base station (BS) in a homogeneous network, a macro-node for a macro cell or a pico-node for a small cell in a heterogeneous network, will transmit SSS which allows the UE to identify the information applicable to this access node from the AIT. However, the AITs do not need to be transmitted by every access node. For example, an access node, such as a macro-node serving a macro cell may transmit both an AIT and SSS, while an access node, such as a pico-node serving a small cell within a coverage region of the macro cell may transmit only SSS.
Generally, the AIT is designed to include all possible parameter combinations of all access nodes to support all possible access configurations and system information. Thus, the payload or capacity of the AIT would be very large to include such much possibility of the parameter combination, i.e., a large number of entries should be included in the AIT, which would challenge the receiving and detection for communication devices. Therefore, the effort to detect SSS from a very large of candidates could be much time and power-consuming for a communication device, before it accessing the network, resulting high energy consumption.